CFP 2019 University of Maryland Conference
12th Annual Graduate English Organization Conference: “Witness”
Department of English
University of Maryland, College Park
March 9, 2019
Witnesses and witnessing are a paradoxical feature of our culture, our politics, and our literature. As scholars have recognized, the witness has played an important rhetorical role in the development of psychological, scientific, religious, legal, and philosophical structures and procedures. Donna Haraway, for example, has explored the function of the “modest witness” in validating matters of fact in the experimental theaters of early modernity. The third-party witness was crucial to the development of Enlightenment knowledge making and persists in today’s figuration of the legal witness. Witness law has been a site of oppression and an index of social inequality: American law once forbade the testimony of enslaved witnesses, and many legal systems have accorded women’s testimony less credibility than men’s. Material witnesses are called to trials--and, during the War on Terror, have been indefinitely detained without trial. Witnesses ground our claims of knowledge, but our epistemology also grounds who may witness and to what they may testify.
But witness goes well beyond courts of law. A word that once meant “wisdom,” witness has relevance to a wide range of fields, from moral philosophy to cinema studies. Many people desire to be “witnesses to history,” while others speak of the “witness of conscience.” One can “bear witness” to a traumatic history or to religious convictions--or sometimes, like Olaudah Equiano, to both at the same time.
The 2019 GEO Conference, Witness, invites papers and panels that consider the literary and cultural implications of witness. This conference explores the many forms of witness that inform literary and cultural practice. We ask, how do writers represent witness? What paradoxes emerge when fictional texts bear witness to historical realities? How do literary texts define witnesses, and what are the stakes of representing someone as a witness? Is witness a weight that one must bear or a truth than one may bare? What happens when a historical witness enters the realm of the aesthetic?
In addition to critical presentations, we welcome collaborative projects and creative work in fiction, poetry, drama, dance, arts, and film. Topics of potential essays can include, but are not limited to:
● Representations of witnesses or witnessing in literature, film, drama, and other cultural forms
● Works of art as acts of witness
● Issues of representation, testimony, and/or witness
● Gendered, racialized, and other differentiated forms of witness
● Witnessing in the law; law and literature
● Epistemology, witnesses, and knowledge production
● The gaze, witness, and vision
● The body, especially as testimony or source/site of knowledge
● Global and transnational knowledge and witness
● Technology and its role in witnessing and knowledge production; technological impacts on representation; the posthuman
● Witnessing at a distance: social media, hypertext, and/or digital representation
● Work and witness: labor that bears witness; witness in the workplace; the political work of art and aesthetic
● Witness and history: witnesses to history, witnessing as making history
● The past as witness; issues of history and representation
● Witnesses to trauma and the trauma of witnessing
● Ambiguities of the material; material witnesses and/or the materiality of witnessing
Please submit proposals for fifteen-minute presentations. Panel submissions (three presentations per panel) are highly encouraged, as are other collaborative projects. Proposals for papers or panels should be 300-word abstracts. Proposals for creative work should be a short sample from an original composition or a description of the intended work. Please include your full name and email address.
Abstracts are due December 15 and should be e-mailed to conference.geo@gmail.com.
As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding. See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding. Remember also that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference, and that you don’t have to wait for your paper or abstract to be accepted before you apply. (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)
Department of English
University of Maryland, College Park
March 9, 2019
Witnesses and witnessing are a paradoxical feature of our culture, our politics, and our literature. As scholars have recognized, the witness has played an important rhetorical role in the development of psychological, scientific, religious, legal, and philosophical structures and procedures. Donna Haraway, for example, has explored the function of the “modest witness” in validating matters of fact in the experimental theaters of early modernity. The third-party witness was crucial to the development of Enlightenment knowledge making and persists in today’s figuration of the legal witness. Witness law has been a site of oppression and an index of social inequality: American law once forbade the testimony of enslaved witnesses, and many legal systems have accorded women’s testimony less credibility than men’s. Material witnesses are called to trials--and, during the War on Terror, have been indefinitely detained without trial. Witnesses ground our claims of knowledge, but our epistemology also grounds who may witness and to what they may testify.
But witness goes well beyond courts of law. A word that once meant “wisdom,” witness has relevance to a wide range of fields, from moral philosophy to cinema studies. Many people desire to be “witnesses to history,” while others speak of the “witness of conscience.” One can “bear witness” to a traumatic history or to religious convictions--or sometimes, like Olaudah Equiano, to both at the same time.
The 2019 GEO Conference, Witness, invites papers and panels that consider the literary and cultural implications of witness. This conference explores the many forms of witness that inform literary and cultural practice. We ask, how do writers represent witness? What paradoxes emerge when fictional texts bear witness to historical realities? How do literary texts define witnesses, and what are the stakes of representing someone as a witness? Is witness a weight that one must bear or a truth than one may bare? What happens when a historical witness enters the realm of the aesthetic?
In addition to critical presentations, we welcome collaborative projects and creative work in fiction, poetry, drama, dance, arts, and film. Topics of potential essays can include, but are not limited to:
● Representations of witnesses or witnessing in literature, film, drama, and other cultural forms
● Works of art as acts of witness
● Issues of representation, testimony, and/or witness
● Gendered, racialized, and other differentiated forms of witness
● Witnessing in the law; law and literature
● Epistemology, witnesses, and knowledge production
● The gaze, witness, and vision
● The body, especially as testimony or source/site of knowledge
● Global and transnational knowledge and witness
● Technology and its role in witnessing and knowledge production; technological impacts on representation; the posthuman
● Witnessing at a distance: social media, hypertext, and/or digital representation
● Work and witness: labor that bears witness; witness in the workplace; the political work of art and aesthetic
● Witness and history: witnesses to history, witnessing as making history
● The past as witness; issues of history and representation
● Witnesses to trauma and the trauma of witnessing
● Ambiguities of the material; material witnesses and/or the materiality of witnessing
Please submit proposals for fifteen-minute presentations. Panel submissions (three presentations per panel) are highly encouraged, as are other collaborative projects. Proposals for papers or panels should be 300-word abstracts. Proposals for creative work should be a short sample from an original composition or a description of the intended work. Please include your full name and email address.
Abstracts are due December 15 and should be e-mailed to conference.geo@gmail.com.
As always, remember that if you decide to submit proposals to any conferences, be sure to consider applying for funding. See the Graduate Studies Office’s webpage on Conference Travel Funding. Remember also that you have to apply for the funding before you attend the conference, and that you don’t have to wait for your paper or abstract to be accepted before you apply. (In recent years, the funding has tended to run out early in the spring semester.)
Comments
Post a Comment